Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense), _misères_--wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously. During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I think they call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr. Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is, however, something more--for it comes also from a failure to estimate aright the _parabasis_-openings which have been more than once referred to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to surpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his "toylike" scheme, are remarkable toys indeed--toys which, if we regard them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimes constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make than to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be very difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the personages of _Tom Jones_. With one possible exception they are all alive--even more so than those of _Joseph Andrews_ and with a less peculiar and limited liveliness than those of _Jonathan Wild_. But it certainly is curious that as the one good man of _Jonathan_, Heartfree, is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of _Tom_, Blifil, occupies the same position.